Narrative prose

Abstract

The novel During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the novel developed as a distinct literary genre and began to impress itself on the literary consciousness of Western Europe as the most prestigious narrative mode. As early as 1640, the novelist Luca Assarino could proclaim with pride in his Almerinda (Venice, 1640): ‘This is the great century of the novel’. More revealing for an understanding of the historical and aesthetic reasons for the favourable reception of the new genre is the statement in Giovan Battista Manzini's preface to Il Crediteo (Bologna, 1637): ‘This kind of composition which is called by the moderns romanzo is the most difficult – when written in accordance with the rules of art – and as a result the most marvellous and glorious construct that human ingenuity can build’. No fewer than 180 novels were published in Italy between 1600 and 1699. The pace of production quickened in the 1630s, peaked in the 1640s and 1650s, and practically came to a halt in the 1660s. Many of these novels enjoyed a remarkable popularity with their contemporaries, some of them going through more than thirty editions or reprints (while the same period saw only three new editions of the Divine Comedy ). Moreover, a good number of them were translated into the other major European languages. Unquestionably, the seventeenth-century novel had a clear international character. The Neapolitan book collector Antonio Matina, in a catalogue of his private library compiled in the 1660s, lists ninety-two Seicento titles in Italian, fifteen in Spanish, twenty in French, and some thirty translations from French.

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